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  1. by on - Book review

    A review of the popular, comic-style illustrated book by Sydney Padua that fictionalises the lives of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and their invention of the first computer.

  2. by on - Discussion

    Charismatic objects provide invaluable, if challenging, resources for telling stories about the history of longitude at sea. In this article recent collaborative research and museum work is used to explore some opportunities and puzzles of the combination of object study and public exhibitions.

  3. by on - Discussion

    Displays of instruments in science museums are closer to those of decorative arts artefacts than to the presentation of real functional and practical objects. This article offers a critique and suggests a path forward to go beyond functionless objects.

  4. by on - Discussion

    A review of conservation concepts and practice, and provision of access to objects. Discussion of the conservation issues which arise when industrial objects are operated, and of the need for research into the effects of operation and the visitor experience.

  5. by on - Discussion

    This essay considers some challenges of collecting contemporary artefacts, and questions whether such artefacts actually offer any greater challenges for museum storytelling than those from earlier periods. The article also discusses some opportunities of contemporary collecting, many of which have yet to be fully harnessed by science and technology museums.

  6. by on - Discussion

    This paper explores the material culture, electrical standards, and romance of early cable telegraphy as described in renowned physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s slightly tongue-in-cheek 1860 poem 'Valentine from A Telegraph Clerk ♂ to a Telegraph Clerk ♀'.

  7. by on - Obituary

    Obituary of Dr Anita McConnell FRGS FRSA FRMetS (1936–2016)

  8. by on - Object focus

    The article investigates the construction, reception and fate of a set of models of the Airy Transit Circle (the instrument that defined the Greenwich Prime Meridian) at the Exposition Universelle in 1855 and at the South Kensington Museum.

  9. by on - Research

    In 1761–62, King George III commissioned a group of philosophical instruments from the London instrument-maker George Adams. This article traces Adams’s techniques of borrowing and adapting printed instrument designs, as he produced this spectacular collection.

  10. by on - Research

    This is a study of the positive relationship between James Short and John Harrison, set in two eighteenth-century contexts: the notion of individual aptitude or ‘genius’ unspoilt by education or training; and the problem of how individual ability might be captured and formulated as public knowledge.

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